I'm not sure what to think of that opening. Maybe it'll grow on me. I think it might be hard to top Flower Sign from Ayesha though, so maybe my expectations were a bit high when it comes to opening movie themes.

It has a lot of the bad habits that Ayesha's opening did. A lot of, daresay, "clipart" and textiles hit this opening the same way weird flourishes sort of sprouted everywhere in Ayesha's. Similarly, despite the wide and crazy cast, we only saw Ayesha and Nio in her game's intro and here we just get Escha and Logy.

Both songs were good, but little action otherwise. I'd say Ayesha did a better job with the mood, but this opening was clearly going for a bit more pizzaz and ...a less lullaby-y sound..

EURO ROCK. Nobody else gets that impression or did I just hear too much of it growing up?

Eastern Europe, not gypsy or Beatles. =P I played it for my mum and she agreed (my dad will be the real test). It's hard to explain, but I've grown up with parents who can't lose their flair for music from the homeland so I could pick up on it (I'll try to find an example).

Anyways, I like it a lot. The riff is catchy and the theme, thank Christ, isn't generic J-pop (they tried that, the results was that fuckhead of a theme from Atelier Iris 2). The visuals, even if not terribly varied, still manages to work well with the melody (and I *adore* the flowers, fleur de lis, and other symbols matching the opening's bass right at the start).

Again, simple, but it worked for Ayesha's too with the flower maze and slowly crumbling ruins and all the floating around in some weird space.

The animation for the Arland series was...just boring, so I kinda like the more abstract and visually and musically-driven openings even if they detail less about the game.

There is a pert of me that hates myself for not having played Ayesha. I have hopes to get it from my GF. It was supposed to be a surprise but she called me asking how to order from play-asia and I said that Ayesha she would not find here under no circumstances, only online.

The thing is I got sad because of the dual audio thing so I decided to wait for a possible deal on either the US or Japanese version.

As for the opening, I like it a lot. Like some I preffer Ayesha's but I think it fits perfectly for a game that has two main characters.

^ Ayesha, rather the Atelier series is a bit of a tough thing to reccomend.

I think if Gust spent another...maybe few weeks or a month to polish the games, they'd be bumped a full-letter grade. And while the alchemy system is extremely well-done and incredible in-depth, too much of the rest is somewhat sloppy (music and artwork aside). Since Rorona, the graphics have gotten exponentially better. But, and in Ayesha, there are about 10 variaties of enemies and I think only 3 storyline bosses (so yeah, the rest are enemies and harder versions of those enemies as "area bosses"). The game is also dialogue-heavy, which is good if you love light-hearted anime, but bad to the rest of the world because the "quality" of writing (rather lack of) makes cutscenes a drag and the characters as 3D anime tropes.

There's also a lack of direction in the games. Of course, Ayesha is the most lenient of the [traditional-style] Atelier games.

If you can excuse that, I totally recommend it because there are few games quite like the Atelier series that really exist.

I apologize for the double post, but I just saw the new DLC for Ayesha, and I have to say someone needs to have a word with NIS. If they're going to sell ultimately pointless DLC like costumes, they might want to try pricing it a little cheaper than $3 each. For the new characters, I can kind of see $3, but for a simple costume? Feh.

At least it's not as bad as the Hyperdimension Neptunia series. 90 pieces of DLC each, ranging anywhere from $1-$6... that's just crazy.